| So Steve Jobs made the big announcement last night that Apple is moving to Intel processors. Somewhere in there he also said that OSX86 would only run on Apple hardware. What puzzles me about this is what makes an Intel motherboard an Apple motherboard. If you look inside a current Apple desktop there's a lot of commodity hardware; disk drive, PSU, memory, graphics card etc. You can run a PC keyboard and mouse. They have USB ports, ethernet ports and so on. Now presumably the early machines will be Intel processors with Intel glue chips and an Intel motherboard. And I bet they will be very, very similar to Intel PC motherboards. My guess is that there will be a single Apple ROM or gate array that the OS will lock into. Which means I think that we'll see a rash of almost functional clones that try to reverse engineer the Apple proprietary bit and/or that require the addition of a single Apple chip from a genuine Apple machine. There's strong sense of deja vu here as we've been here before back in the old Mac world. The catch this time around is that the Apple chip is likely to be surface mounted rather than socketed. One other catch in all this. It's very likely that future Intel chips will have hardware support for a DRM standard that will also be supported by MS in Longhorn. So what we'll have is "One DRM to rule them all, One DRM to find them, One DRM to bring them all, And in the darkness bind them". Should give the MPAA and RIAA some hope. Except of course that all DRM gets broken. Just Say No To DRM! [from: JB Ecademy] |
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[ 07-Jun-05 9:40am ]
